Tag: Cinema

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Review: Fags in the Fast Lane

With a title like Fags in the Fast Lane, you expect a certain type of movie: politically incorrect. Exploitation throwback. Very, very silly. Australian production company Zombie Zoo Productions delivers on all of these counts, though my take is that co-writer/director Josh “Sinbad” Collins’s film is ultimately so good-natured, it’s unlikely to offend anyone. I once read a review that described the “candy-colored, amiably slapdash” Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, and that review popped into my head while watching Fags in the Fast Lane, with its fanciful costumes, arch performances, and hilarious miniatures, which make no attempt at realism whatsoever. (A dinosaur scene is about as convincing as the time I filmed my Jurassic World toys for YouTube.)

 

What semblance there is of a plot involves dynamic duo Sir Beauregard (Chris Asimos) and Reginald Lumpton III (Matt Jones) and their attempt to track down the burlesque gang (played by performance troupe the GoGo Goddesses) who stole precious jewels from Beau’s mom Kitten (these names!). Kitten is played, naturally, by Kitten Navidad, who earned her vintage sexploitation bonafides as the star of Russ Myers’ infamous Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Here, she’s a Madame running a GILF bordello. When she’s not having hilariously energetic sex with the villainous Chief (Pugsley Buzzard), she’s wailing about her stolen jewels. Beau, who always calls her “mama” because of course he does, enlists the Chief’s twink son Squirt (Oliver Bell) and Salome (Sacha Cuhar) to take on the gang’s fearsome leader, Wanda the Giantess (Aimee Nichols). Wanda’s voice is intensely, hilariously deep, and she is in possession of something even more precious than jewels: the powerful “Golden Cock”!

 

Really, this is all an excuse for a series of loosely connected skits, action sequences, and musical numbers. Highlights include a cheeky ballad sung by Hijra (Arish A. Khan) when he loses his “precious Golden Cock” and a stop motion animated sequence in which Squirt is “threatened” by all manner of phallic swamp creatures. As a cis gay man, I wasn’t personally offended by any of this nonsense, although a baseball bat is shoved pretty severely up a character’s butt (the “special effects” are too low grade for it to be all that gross) and Salome’s gender bending character leads to some offensive terminology: a “she-male worshipping cult” that is one of the approximately thirty-five brief subplots. Salome herself is sexy and ass-kicking, in any case.

 

Interestingly, director Collins is straight. According to the entertaining press notes, he and his wife Barbara “have created a variety of retro parties, theme bars, and happenings around the globe.” With Fags in the Fast Lane, they give us queer characters to root for and a memorable slice of ridiculous fun.

 

Fags in the Fast Lane is available on DVD

 

 

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Review: Picnic at Hanging Rock

This twisty mystery could be your next obsession. Amazon’s miniseries Picnic at Hanging Rock is an adaptation of the Joan Lindsay novel (previously adapted into what has become a cult film directed by Peter Weir) about the mysterious disappearance of a group of girls at an Australian finishing school circa Valentine’s Day 1900. Based on the premiere episode screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, the series will be way more complex than even that tantalizing description suggests.

 

Fan fave Natalie Dormer (Game of Thrones) stars as Mrs. Appleyard, the enigmatic (to say the least) headmistress of the boarding school, who rules with an iron fist. From the very first scene, in which she poses as a widow scouting a potential home for the school (actually played by multiple houses, all ornate and gorgeous) and “converses” with her dead husband, we know there’s much more to her than meets the eye. The same can be said for the students, including rising star Samara Weaving (The Babysitter, Mayhem) as Irma, the girl all the boys want, and Inez Curro as pretween Sara, who’s wound up at the school following some mysterious trauma at home. By the time the girls embark on the all-important Valentine’s Day picnic, there’s enough intrigue for a season’s worth of soap opera afoot. Irma and her clique excuse themselves for a mountaintop excursion, which they’ve obviously planned ahead of time—but why? Just how close are these girls, anyway? The shit suddenly hits the fan, seemingly due to some supernatural force, and the hour ends on a cliffhanger.

 

Picnic at Hanging Rock is one of the weirdest things I’ve seen in a long time– and it’s glorious. Garry Phillips’s cinematography is exquisite; the costumes are colorful and eye-popping; the mostly female cast is superb across the board. Dormer in particular is in fine form, clearly relishing this enigmatic role. At the festival panel, she joked that she was dead set against “another corset job” but was persuaded by a chat with the director, and watching her sink her teeth into this part, it’s easy to see why! The eerie, hallucinatory effect of the program is enhanced by unnerving sound design and a great score by Cezary Skubiszewski. I am very much looking forward to bingeing this series, and based on the pilot, it could definitely catch on with a cult audience.

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Review: Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley, my favorite feature from this year’s Tribeca Film Festival (and now available to stream), casts an electrifying Elle Fanning as the woman who invented science fiction with the classic novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Mary’s been portrayed on screen before, by the likes of Elsa Lanchester (who was both creator and creation in Bride of Frankenstein) and Natasha Richardson (in Ken Russell’s baroque and bizarre Gothic), but never before with any sense of realism, and certainly not in so feminist a manner as this movie.

 

Which isn’t to say that Mary Shelley—which, ahem, was directed by Saudi Arabia’s first female director, Haifaa Al-Mansour—is without style. It’s a gorgeously shot, meticulously designed work that dramatizes its real world characters with immediacy and excitement. Still reeling from the death of her mother, and stymied by the tyrannical presence of her stepmother, Mary is a misfit who buries her nose in horrific, “unsavory” books and has no one to rely on apart from her sister Claire (Bel Powley). That is, until she meets the beguiling poet Percy Shelley (Douglas Booth), her father’s literary apprentice, and the two embark on a forbidden romance. Eventually the lovers run away together, taking along Claire, but happiness proves elusive for the trio. The mercurial, philandering Percy causes Mary no small amount of pain, and Claire’s affair with the enigmatic Lord Byron (scene-stealing Tom Sturridge) causes her equal misery. Through it all, Mary manages to persevere and put pen to paper for the masterpiece that is Frankenstein—even if she has to convince sexist publishers to take a chance on such a ghastly work for a female author. The inspiration for this monstrous tale is rendered in gripping cinematic fashion, by a “Phantasmagoria” stage show the characters witness and an eerie nightmare Mary has while staying at Byron’s Swiss villa.

 

Mary Shelley makes many such flourishes, and takes liberties with the truth—but it works, and the effect is beautiful. The poetic dialogue sounds like it belongs in an exceptionally witty play; it’s delivered by a great cast led by the excellent Fanning. Booth is appropriately beautiful and narcissistic as Percy, while Powley brings levels to the tortured Claire. Sturridge, as Byron, makes quite the impression on characters and audience when he greets Percy with a kiss on the lips; sadly, his bisexuality is left largely unexplored, save for a vague allusion later on. It’s forgivable considering how much material the writers (Emma Jensen and Al-Mansour) had to whittle down. There’s also a gorgeous score by actress/composer Amelia Warner.

 

Mary Shelley is a fast-moving, fanciful, yet resonant treatment of the life and talent of the famous author. It reveals a uniquely female perspective on love, loss, and sisterhood, and sheds a very modern light on the pitfalls of navigating a sexist world. Go see it.